Outdoor cooking equipment, such as smoking devices and barbecue grills, have become increasing popular in recent years because of renewed interest in outdoor cooking. Televised cooking programs and the increase in local food contests and fairs have also added to this increase in popularity.
Conventional outdoor cooking apparatuses use a variety of techniques—ranging in convenience to the user—to cook the food. These include gas burning ovens or barbecues, conventional charcoal or wood burning ovens or barbecues, as well as smoking devices (or smokers). While gas burners can decrease cooking times and increase ease of cooking, slow cooking over charcoal or wood is still used to maximize flavor.
Conventional outdoor smokers include a chamber for burning either charcoal and/or wood. The smoke and heated air is then directed to a cooking chamber to cook items placed therein. The smoke and heated air is then exhausted out of the smoker.
Various problems are associated with existing cooking apparatuses. For example, the ash tray in known existing smokers is normally contained within the burning chamber. This creates a safety hazard and makes it difficult or impossible to remove for emptying during a cooking process. It also is an area that can create build-up requiring strenuous cleaning. Moreover, scraping the ashes out of the burning chamber creates dust which can be a health hazard.
Additionally, most conventional smokers are configured so that rain or snow (or any other material) entering the exhaust stack will flow directly into the cooking area. This can effect gross cooking temperature and temperature uniformity within the cooking chamber (thereby increasing the cooking time) and otherwise ruin the food being cooked by getting it wet.
Another problem with known smokers is maintaining an even continuous temperature in the cooking chamber. Drafts and other structural features in known devices create large temperature fluctuations, effectively creating hot and cold spots in the chamber.
To ensure a high quality smoking environment, it is important to be able to control the gross cooking temperature and maintain temperature uniformity in the cooking chamber. Most current wood and/or charcoal smokers on the market today do not do a good job at either type of temperature control. Instead, user's of such smokers resort to complex or costly implementations to overcome the problems described, and/or resort to alternative heat sources (e.g., electric or gas) which can lower the flavor quality of the smoked product.
To maintain an adequate gross temperature, much of the industry has adopted either electric or gas cooking. Each method has significant downsides. Gas smokers require gas cylinder replacement. These cylinders are typically heavy and cumbersome to exchange. Electric smokers need an electrical source of power. Accordingly, the smoker needs to be near an outlet, or have an electric generator nearby. Additionally, an electric smoker requires on-board hardware and/or software to control the temperature which can ultimately fail. Further, electrical heating elements tend to get dirty from the oil, in vapor and droplet form, produced in the cooking process, which can also lead to failure of the system.
Both gas and electric smokers require a separate smoke creating device because no flavor (i.e., smoke) is created by the heating source. Known smokers, such as the Bradley smoker, the Traegger smoker and others, usually add smoke via an electric feeder that feeds specialized wood pellets or pucks into the cooking area. Again, this adds complexity and cost to the smoker and typically limits the user to only using pucks provided by the smoker vendor.
Temperature variation in the cooking chamber of conventional smokers also creates cooking issues. Typically, smokers employ a heat source into the cooking chamber at a low spot, either by putting the “burner box” physically below the cooking chamber or to the side of the cooking chamber but positioned lower than the chamber. The exhaust of the typical smoker is on the top of the unit. As hot air enters the cooking chamber, it immediately flows to the top of the chamber due to buoyant forces, and then flows out of the exhaust stack. This induces temperature variations from side to side and from top to bottom of the cooking chamber. These variations can be between 50-100 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the smoker design.
To overcome or deal with such temperature variations some smokers are provided with a rotisserie apparatus. The rotisserie apparatus rotates the meat through all the various temperature zones. In this manner, all of the meat is exposed to all of the same temperature variations. However, these apparatuses require an electric motor which places constraints on their location (as explained above with respect to electric smokers). Additionally, the rotisserie apparatus adds moving parts, such as belts, pulleys, gearboxes, etc. to the system which can fail and require maintanence.
Some conventional electric smokers utilize a fan to re-circulate the air throughout the cooking chamber. This helps provide for more uniformity of the temperature throughout the cooking chamber. However, the fan gets extremely dirty due to the oil in the cooking chamber, which requires cleaning and maintenance.
The wood and/or charcoal smokers on the market today often use a “water bath” as a method of dampening temperature variations. In this design, if the temperature of the fire gets too high, the water in the bath will tend to boil, which absorbs much of the excess heat. While the manufacturer's of such smokers claim the moisture from the water bath helps keep the meat in the cooking chamber moist, in reality any meat cooked above 212 degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours looses much of its inherent moisture. At those temperatures, water becomes vapor and acts like a gas, in which air has a very high capability to absorb this vapor. In this situation, all substances, including meats, will tend to dry out.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not provided by prior smoking devices. A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.